Family Dollar is a discount store chain, with headquarters in Matthews, North Carolina. The company operates over 7,100 stores in 45 states and in Washington D.C. As one of the first discount stores, Family Dollar expanded to over 6,800 stores in 44 states and competes with large companies such as Costco, Dollar General, and Wal-Mart.

David Fanning led a tumultuous life and was a controversial figure during and after the Revolutionary War. Once a Patriot, Fanning turned to the Loyalist cause and was able to raise as many as 950 men for his missions.

Friend of Royal Governor William Tryon and clerk of the Superior Court of Orange County, Edmund Fanning angered many North Carolina Regulators, who accused him of embezzlement and abuses of power. After helping put down the Regulator Rebellion, Fanning accompanied Lord Tryon to New York, where he worked in the royal colony’s administration and remained a Loyaist during the American Revolution.

“The longest and most noted of the plank roads constructed in North Carolina,” the Fayetteville and Western Plank Road stretched 129 miles from Fayetteville to Bethania, a Moravian village outside of Salem. But its size contributed to its demise as a major avenue of trade.

Called by the North Carolina General Assembly in 1789, the Fayetteville Convention was the second meeting to consider ratification of the Federal Constitution in North Carolina. It followed the Hillsborough Convention, at which delegates, rather than rejecting the new Constitution, refused to ratify it.

The first normal school for African Americans in North Carolina, Fayetteville State University (FSU) was established in 1867 as the Howard School. Although FSU was once a school strictly for the education of teachers, the school grew in the 1950s as new programs were added to the institution’s curricula. Today, over 6,300 students currently attend FSU and the institution offers a Freshman Year Initiative program to incoming students.

A bustling, 1800s hub of trade and political activity, home to an important arsenal and center of trade during the Civil War, and home to Fort Bragg and Pope Air Force bases during the twentieth century, Fayetteville has played an important role in North Carolina history and will continue to do so.

Signed into law on May 12, 1933, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) was a New Deal government-spending program established to give direct cash assistance to the impoverished. Different from work relief agencies such as the National Recovery Administration and the Public Works Administration, which created jobs for the unemployed, FERA offered only short-term subsistence support. FERA’s poor design coupled with its low per capita grants failed to assuage the effects of the Great Depression in North Carolina.

Some historians have criticized the paper and pulp companies of southeastern North Carolina for threatening the local environment. Environmentalists have been especially concerned with the effect of the paper and pulp industry in the area known as the Green Swamp located east of Columbus in Brunswick County. However, some paper and pulp companies have been actively involved in preserving the environment that they have used for profit.

Originally, the term “Federalist” referred to supporters of the federal constitution of 1787. Though the Federalist Party existed for less than half of a century, it helped define the new nation. Though they may have lost many political battles, Federalists may have won the war, for their vision of a cosmopolitan and industrialized America eventually came to fruition.

Though Mills Higgins Flack (1838-1900) was a politically active and religiously devout veteran, he also had a dark side: a cruel and exploitative relationship with his black sharecroppers. This bad blood eventually led to the horrific Forest City lynching.

Alfred Johnson Fletcher, the seventh of fourteen children, was born in 1887 in the mountains of North Carolina. After studying law at Wake Forest College, he opened a practice in Fuquay-Varina, North Carolina. His greatest achievement was the Capitol Broadcasting Company, which he created when he applied for a 250 watt AM station in 1937. When he went on the air in 1939, he was only the second radio station in Raleigh.

Born in Illinois, Inglish Fletcher first visited North Carolina in 1934 researching her genealogy in the Tyrrell County historical records. She published her most prominent novel, Raleigh’s Eden, in 1941, and it detailed the Albemarle plantation culture in colonial North Carolina. Dedicated to research and historical accuracy, Fletcher published a twelve volume historical fiction set entitled the Carolina Series. The novelist moved to Edenton in 1941 where she became a prominent citizen who help start the North Carolina Writers Conference and the Elizabethan Gardens on the Roanoke Island.

From Spring 1918 to early 1919, North Carolina experienced the deadliest flu pandemic in modern times. An influenza virus spread throughout Europe, then North America, and eventually the globe. By April 1919, the virus infected one million North Carolinians and among them, 13,600 died.

A regional grocery chain and subsidiary of Belgium-based Delhaize Group, Food Lion began in 1957 as a one-store operation in Salisbury, North Carolina, under the name Food Town and the direction of Ralph W. Ketner. After the introduction of the LFPINC concept in 1967, the grocery chain grew from seven stores to approximately 800 in 1991, the year in which Ketner retired. Before then in 1983, the company had changed its name to Food Town. During the early 1990s, the supermarket chain went through legal battles that curbed its exponential growth. Under the leadership of DelHaize Group executives, the company in February 2007 employed approximately 73,000 workers in almost 1,200 stores and served nearly ten million customers in eleven states.

The end of slavery in North Carolina did little to ease racial tensions. The struggle between slaves and plantation owners was replaced by the conflict between black sharecroppers and wealthy white farmers. Occasionally this struggle erupted into open violence, as in the 1900 lynching of Avery Mills in Rutherford, North Carolina.

Subsequent to the fall of Fort Fisher on January 15, 1865, Northern forces began a cautious advance on the city of Wilmington from both sides of the Cape Fear River. After the evacuation of Fort Anderson on the west side of the river on February 19 by his subordinate, Brigadier General Johnson Hagood and his South Carolinians, Major General Robert F. Hoke knew he had to abandon his defensive position on the eastern side of the river at Sugar Loaf. Without any strong fortifications to fall back on, Hoke knew that making a stand between the enemy and Wilmington would be difficult.

With deep connections to the Moravian religion and to Reynolds Tobacco, Forsyth County has been an essential region to North Carolina. Named after Benjamin Forsyth, a War of 1812 colonel, the county was formed in 1849 and its seat is Winston-Salem.

Built atop the remnants of the colonial town, Brunswick, Fort Anderson protected the Cape Fear River and supply lines to Wilmington. Wilmington was a critical port for supply lines throughout the Confederacy and to General Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia in Petersburg and Richmond. Although originally named Fort St. Phillip after the colonial Anglican Church ruins within the fortress, the fort was renamed in honor of Brigadier General George Burgwyn Anderson who died after complications from injuries suffered at Antietam.

Fort Bragg is a United States Army base located west of Fayetteville, North Carolina and is the one of the largest military bases in the world. Covering 251 square miles in four different counties, Fort Bragg is home to the U.S. Army’s Airborne Forces and Special Forces and also houses U.S. Army Forces Command and U.S. Army Reserve Command.

The home of Revolutionary War general William Lenoir, Fort Defiance was built in 1792 in what is now Caldwell County. Prior to Lenoir’s ownership, the house was built on a fort site that was used by British colonists.

Twenty-seven miles west of modern-day Salisbury, North Carolina, Fort Dobbs is located in Iredell County. In 1756, colonial Governor Arthur Dobbs commissioned the construction of the fort to protect Piedmont settlements during the French and Indian War (1754-1763). At that time, Fort Dobbs was North Carolina’s only frontier fort; all others were on the coast.

Until its capture by the Union army in 1865, Fort Fisher was the largest earthwork fortification in the world. The “Gibraltar of the South” protected the port of Wilmington and ensured that the Confederacy had at least one “lifeline” until the last few months of the Civil War. Confederate blockade runners had little difficulty eluding the U.S. blockade, and Colonel William Lamb, the fort’s commander from 1862 to 1864, organized their efforts. The runners delivered goods in Wilmington, and The Wilmington and Weldon Railroad transported these goods to supply Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.

The American Civil War was a tumultuous time. In the North Carolina mountains, in particular, the war offered opportunities for mountaineers to be unjustifiably violent. In some high country places, civility ended, outlaws ruled, and cruelty prevailed. The Fort Hamby Gang of Wilkes County provides an example.

Named in honor of Nathaniel Macon, a United States congressman and senator and a leading early-republic statesman of North Carolina, Fort Macon was built after the War of 1812 to defend America and North Carolina from foreign invasion. During the Civil War, Fort Macon was a Confederate fort, but Union Major General Ambrose E. Burnside had plans to return it under Union control.

The first governor to live in the current executive mansion, Daniel Fowle died while in office. He is most known for advocating for a college for women that later was called University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

A Patriot during the Revolutionary War, Jesse Franklin later served his state in the House of Commons, as a state senator, as a U.S. Representative, a U.S. Senator (president pro tempore), and finally as governor of North Carolina. Although only governor for one term, Franklin earned a reputation for being a practical, fiscal conservative.

The State of Franklin existed from 1784 to 1789 in what is now upper East Tennessee. It was situated on lands that North Carolina ceded to the federal government, yet the State of Franklin was not recognized by North Carolina or by the federal government. This lack of recognition was due not only to factionalism among the Franklinites but also to factors surrounding North Carolina’s cession of its western lands.

After the Civil War, Northern missionaries and Freedmen’s Bureau agents encouraged emancipated slaves to participate in a free-labor economy and embody middle-class values. But the South lay in ruins. It was difficult for many whites to rebound financially and for former slaves to find work, much less start enterprising careers. Freedmen, however, adjusted quickly to the demands of a free-labor economy.

The Freedmen’s Conventions of 1865 and 1866 were the first statewide gatherings of blacks in North Carolina. Delegates such as James E. O’Hara and John Hyman delivered speeches and voiced their support for inclusion of blacks in the political and judicial arena. The Freedmen Convention met as a response to the all-white state Constitutional Convention that met in Raleigh in 1865.

Serving from 1956 to 1986, William Clyde “Bill” Friday was the first and longest serving president of the University of North Carolina. During his tenure, Friday made significant changes to North Carolina higher education including playing major roles in the formation of the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC), the development of the Research Triangle Park, and the consolidation and expansion of the state’s 16-campus system.

A Bavarian mechanic, Louis Froelich immigrated first to England and traveled later across the Atlantic to the United States. After working in New York City, he traveled southward and started his entrepreneurial activities in Wilmington, North Carolina. There, he earned the nickname the “Sword Maker for the Confederacy.”

During the 1890s, a national phenomenon called Fusion politics united political parties. In some western states the Populist (or People’s Party) and the Democratic Party united, but in North Carolina the movement, spearheaded by agricultural leader Marion Butler (1863-1938), combined the Populist and Republican parties. In the presidential election of 1896, the Populist Party found itself ironically backing the Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925) at the national level, while joining forces with Republicans at the state level.